I am a guitar player, but I didn't play guitar on this record. When I conceived of the project I decided to learn a new instrument, in order to put myself in the beginner's mind. I learned to play the bass. Bass and piano (which I taught myself just out of grad school by renting practice rooms at The Greenwich House Music School in New York for five dollars a day) were my instruments for recording these songs. Inside Man began as a bass riff. The first one I'd written. I knew I might have made a good one when my bass teacher dismissed it lesson after lesson as belonging to somebody else. I wrote a joke of a song around it, lyrics that made me giggle and that weren't trying too hard to make sense, and I played it for AG. AG told me she thought the song seemed to be about something hard for me to write and to bring it back when I'd written a song about that thing. To AG songs are not jokes. There had come a time when I'd begun to lose control of my emotions. I keyed the ramp up to what had become my overuse of anger as a means in my work. When it began to dawn on me what I was becoming, I got frightened and could envision accidentally losing my freedom or pushing someone I loved too far. I sought help from a man in Laguna Beach whom I’d found on the internet and who had a trompe l’oeil window overlooking a surfing scene painted onto the wall of a tiny interior room in a leaning-over old two story Spanish building on a side street there. He and I spoke the same language. I thought he was smart and he managed to introduce me to my best self. That experience is what Inside Man was really always about and I rewrote the song for AG. Hopefully it's still a little bit funny.